Biography

Dao Strom was born in Saigon, Vietnam and emigrated to the States in 1973. She grew up in the Sierra foothills of northern California. She bought her first guitar in New York City at the age of twenty, and stepped onto her first stage in Austin, Texas several years later as a member of the all-girl country band, All Night Lincoln. She soon struck out on her own and released her debut album, Send Me Home, in 2004. No Depression publisher Grant Alden was so taken with this album (pulled out of a slush pile of CDs hoping to be reviewed in ND) that he featured a short artist profile of Dao in the Mar 2005 issue of No Depression. Dao Strom is also the author of two books of fiction, Grass Roof, Tin Roof (2003, Mariner Books) and The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys (2006, Counterpoint Press). She has been praised in The New Yorker Magazine and has won fellowships from such prestigious sources as the National Endowment for the Arts for her writing. Her songwriting is no less ambitious and praised. Her songs have been aired on WNYC, KUT and KGSR in Austin, KPIG, KQED, WMBR, among others. Her first album was #4 on the Freeform American Roots charts in 2005. In performance and in person, she is a gentle, unassuming, strikingly honest and kind presence - as her songs will also show. She played SXSW 2006 and released her follow-up album, Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me, in May 2008. She currently resides in Juneau, Alaska with her husband and 9-year old son.

More About 'Everything That Blooms Wrecks Me':

With a spareness that is almost meditative and a fragility rooted in quiet strength, Dao Strom sings of the unspoken spaces of love, the elusive beauty of longing, darkness laced with grace, introspection to the gentlest degree.

From the haunting Appalachian-tinged acapella mythos of “Traveler’s Ode,” to the spare, rhythmic, finger-plucked electric guitar accompanied by cello and delicate piano of the album’s title track, these are songs that have their roots soulfully anchored in traditional American folk music yet also reach uniquely beyond tradition.

Dao has been a traveler in her life and her music reflects this.
Her song-stories are emotional and subtly mystical ones. Love, temples, snow, rivers, fires and seeds, seas and memories. Stars dying across the sky. Paper lanterns and wine coolers. They shed light on inbetween moments and feelings that are hard to describe yet press upon our senses ever so gently and mysteriously. Softly distorted electric guitars weave through a musical landscape of otherwise sparse acoustic arrangements that include cello, accordion, dobro, violin, sweet female harmonies, and laidback acoustic rhythms.

In this music you will find a notable gentleness of perception; an authentic sweetness; an intelligent vulnerability.

Producer: Darwin Smith (http://www.myspace.com/cacophonyrecorders)

Musicians on 'Blooms':

Dao Strom - vocals, harmonies, guitars
Kevin Fox - upright bass, electric guitar, harmonies
Billy Brent Malkus - dobro, electric guitar on "caller of spirit"
Darwin Smith - electric guitars, ebow, harmonies, bells & keys
Joseph Santori - cello
Brian Beken - fiddle, mandolin
Kullen Fuchs - piano, accordion, rhodes
Jimmy Way - drums, sound engineer
Aimee Bobruk - harmonies on "fields of ca" & "sweetness"